


Chip Away at Your Sanity

by Alexicon



Series: marvel works [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Crack, Fluff, M/M, silliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 10:23:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4956655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alexicon/pseuds/Alexicon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and Bucky are competitive. Potato chips (and the bags) are an unexpected weapon between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chip Away at Your Sanity

**Author's Note:**

> "Don't look at me, I didn't come up with this," the author lied blatantly. Uh, sorry about this.

Steve is absolutely wiped when he gets home again. Two missions in one day are extremely unpleasant, especially as the second hadn’t been planned until someone noticed that the Black Talon was in some graveyard attempting to raise zombies again, because he apparently hadn’t learned the first four times that that was a Very Bad Idea. Hopefully, S.H.I.E.L.D. will be able to keep him in prison for longer than a month this time, for attempted murder or even grave desecration, at the very least.

All Steve wants to do now is collapse into bed and wake up in maybe two or three days with food waiting for him when he gets up. He stumps into his apartment, drops all of his gear in a pile on the chair by the kitchen (most of it ends up on the floor loosely centered around the chair, but his shield manages to stay on, balance slightly precarious), and trudges into his room, grunting an acknowledgment to the wary, unmoving darkness of Bucky’s room. Steve sheds his clothes and drops onto the mattress without even bothering to draw back the covers-- but he freezes when he hears a loud crackle break the quiet stillness of the late night.

It comes, he finds, from an enormous plastic bag which once, in its younger years, held enough potato chips to satisfy a birthday party attended by ravenous food-eating contest winners. Steve can feel the evidence tangible beneath him, crumbs scattered across his pillow like small mountains of chip shard against his cheek.

No human being could have consumed this huge snack, this monstrous portion, in the two hours he’d been gone. No human being could have stood the ravages of salt against mouth without succor. No human being could have had the gall, the impudence to eat the potato chips in Steve’s very own bed.

There is, of course, only one person who could have done this.

“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve hisses, internally swearing vengeance, and promptly falls asleep, the crinkled bag clutched to his chest like a teddy bear.

Steve wakes the next morning in a fine temper and storms into the kitchen, holding the empty chip bag before him like a banner. Bucky’s got a bowl of cereal in front of him and a large pile of waffles sitting on a plate at Steve’s place.

 _Well, nice try,_ Steve thinks viciously. _Waffles won’t save you this time._

“ _What is this_ ,” he growls out, brandishing the bag at a sleepy-eyed Bucky, who blinks at it in confusion.

“Bag of chips,” answers Bucky slowly, as if he suspects Steve is losing it. He points toward the waffles helpfully and smiles. “Breakfast!”

“I know it’s a bag of chips! I meant _what was it doing in my room_?” Steve nearly shrieks.

(He is not currently at his best. Steve did not, it must be noted, sleep as much as he should have. This is both because he sets his alarm to an obscene hour of the morning and because Bucky then programmed that alarm to sound Reveille, which Steve instinctively cannot ignore, at the loudest volume possible. Steve could change it to something different, and indeed is tempted to do so nearly every morning that he wakes with his heart pounding and the urge to snap to attention, but Bucky has yet to decide against it being the most hilarious part of his morning, so Steve will keep it until Bucky gets over the joke. He hopes it happens sooner rather than later.)

“I hope it was just sitting there,” Bucky says, innocent as a lamb. “Otherwise we might have to call the Avengers and tell them that your bag was doing things it shouldn’t on your bed, and that could get embarrassing for both of us.”

“I-- what?” Steve says, confused, and then shakes his head. “Never mind. My problem here is that, Bucky. _Bucky_. We have a trashcan. We have at least _three_ trashcans and _two_ recycling bins, actually. You could have thrown it away so easily, but instead you left it on my bed. _Why_?”

Bucky shrugs unapologetically. “I just forgot,” he replies. “No need to get so het up about it.”

“ _Het up_? I am not het up. I am not even a little bit het. What I am is _righteously frustrated_. There were crumbs in my bed, Bucky. There could have been ants.”

“God forbid,” says Bucky dryly. “All right, drama llama, would an apology make you happy?”

“Yes,” Steve answers in a great exhale of air. “Yes, it would.”

“Then I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” Steve says virtuously. “I knew you could be reasonable about this.”

Bucky’s eyes narrow dangerously, and Steve immediately knows he’s said the wrong thing.

“Reasonable, huh?” says Bucky, with a smirk playing on his lips. “Oh, yeah. I can be reasonable.”

And so begins the war.

The next day, Bucky has left four bags on Steve’s impeccably made bed. The day after that, there are twenty and a small pile of lollipop wrappers decorating his floor. Steve, though slow to retaliate externally, concocts a plan which he enacts on the fifth day, wherein the wrappers of the many, many protein bars he’s consumed in the past few days paper an entire wall of Bucky’s room.

Bucky returns the gesture with a vengeance, affixing each individual bag (approximately forty, this time) onto his comforter with minuscule strips of gorilla tape. It’s incredibly tedious and a little difficult to remove.

It is truly astounding how many bags cover Steve’s bed by the end of the first week.

(Steve corners Bruce worriedly the second week, wondering if all the chips-- about a hundred bags in total, now-- that Bucky’s eating will affect his health, and Bruce breaks out into gales of laughter. “You know he’s having us all help eat the chips, right?” he asks, and Steve’s too embarrassed to lie.)

On Monday of the third week, Steve takes all of the chip bags (and the candy wrappers, and the peanut butter jars) and glues them all together into a humanoid shape and paints Bucky’s face in exquisite detail on the head. Then he places it gently between Bucky’s sheets and turns the lights off before stealing back to his own room and waiting for the reaction.

He is rewarded by the most satisfying yelp he has ever heard in his entire life, which includes everything from the ego-boosting screeches from many, many villains to the high-pitched squeal from Sam when he found Steve sleeping on his sofa. (To be fair, Sam had thought that Steve was in another country entirely at the time and was understandably surprised to discover this was not so.) Bucky storms into his room with his pajamas half-unbuttoned and a pair of knives in his hands.

“You,” he says, pointing one of the knives at Steve’s smirking face threateningly, “are in big trouble. I am going to get you for that.”

“Guess you know how it feels, now, to find something unpleasant in your bed when you try to sleep in it,” Steve replies smugly. Bucky’s teeth grind.

“Guess so,” he says in a falsely light tone, then ducks his head, embarrassed. “Uh, can I sleep in here tonight?”

“What?” says Steve, startled.

Bucky makes a face at him. “That thing is creepy, okay? I don’t wanna touch it.”

“It’s just your face, Buck.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a creepy face. Not moving or anything. You know I don’t like dolls for the same reason.”

“I do know that,” Steve says. “Sure, I guess you can sleep in here.”

Steve pulls back the covers and pats the mattress beside him with a cheesy smile. He also carefully does not mention, as he snuggles into Bucky’s side, that Steve could just go in and move the Bucky-sculpture.

(The knives sleep on the night table, next to Steve’s wallet.)

The next morning, Bucky puts the bag sculpture in an out-of-the-way corner in the common rooms without anyone seeing. (It stays there for two months, until Tony finally notices it. Pepper has to save it from panicked threats of arson.)

He gets Steve back that night by emptying the contents of an entire family bag over Steve’s bed. Unfortunately, Steve does not realize this until _after_ he crushes powdered chip into the weave of his sheets.

“Oh, no,” he vows. “He is going _down_.”

Steve steals Bucky’s sheets and switches them with his dirty ones almost as an afterthought. Bucky sleeps in his room again that night.

Everything ends when Steve somehow manages to steal most of Bucky’s guns and position them in the living room, surrounded by potato chips, in huge clay pots in a vaguely floral arrangement. Bucky’s face at seeing this is absolutely spectacular.

“What the hell, Steve,” he says, not quite a question.

“I just found them growing outside,” Steve replies, poorly repressing his laughter. “Aren’t they pretty?”

“ _You’re_ pretty,” Bucky says in his most insulting tone, and tackles Steve at the knees.

They break the pots and then the chips therein. Steve ensures they don’t cut themselves on the clay shards, but he makes certain to get as much potato chip mush in Bucky’s hair as he can. It ends up looking like he’s been in a bad storm where it was raining chips instead of hail. Steve is delighted.

“This has to stop,” Bucky says finally, resting his forehead on Steve’s chest. “If I eat any more of those things any time soon, I’m going to puke all over everything.”

“That’s a charming image, thanks, Buck.” Steve grimaces.

Bucky shakes his head pointedly. Steve has to close his eyes to protect them from little bits of chip falling from Bucky’s head.

“Fine,” Steve agrees, scowling. “This has to stop. What do you propose?”

“Apologies,” says Bucky.

“All right, I accept,” says Steve.

“From _both_ of us,” Bucky grits out.

“Oh. I suppose I am sorry for scaring you, with that doll.”

“I wasn’t scared,” Bucky protests, wounded. “I was-- you know what, it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I left chips on your bed.”

“And the bag,” Steve prompts.

“The chips are part of the bag!”

“The first bag, specifically. The one that started it all.”

“You have a problem,” groans Bucky. “Fine, I’m sorry for that, too. Happy?”

“Yes,” says Steve. “You’re forgiven.”

There’s a moment of silence, then Steve pokes Bucky hard in the ribs.

Bucky snorts and rolls his eyes. “Oh, yeah. You are, too.”

Steve delivers a high-intensity sunshine smile right to Bucky’s face and wriggles a little.

“Not that I’m not enjoying this,” he says, “but I think we should clean this up before someone sees it and calls the police.”

Bucky looks at him quizzically. “There aren’t any people who could come in here who would call the cops on us. I thought that was the whole point of this tower deal.”

“Okay, one, don’t let Tony ever hear you say that,” Steve says, darting a look at where the passive mikes and cameras are in the walls. “And two, I wasn’t being serious about that. I just want to clean this up. Is it a crime to want my living room to look nice?”

“It might be,” mutters Bucky mulishly before surging to his feet.

They get the room mostly clean fairly quickly and leave the rest to the Stark Cleanbot which Bucky had found hiding in their hall closet with a (somehow) doleful expression after Tony had one of his altruistic fits. They’re about halfway to the elevator when Bucky stops in his tracks.

“What’s the matter?” Steve asks, pausing to look at Bucky curiously.

“Uh,” says Bucky, and clears his throat. “You know, I’ve been sleeping pretty well lately.”

“So have I,” Steve says patiently, while Bucky fiddles with his glove.

“And I was thinking, maybe we could continue the whole bed-sharing thing?”

“Sure,” replies Steve, smiling. It hadn’t occurred to him that Bucky might go back to his own room. He feels like he’s dodged a bullet and then only found out about said bullet when it was dug out of the wall by where his head had been. (An extended simile, perhaps, but one which has literally happened to him before, unfortunately.)

Steve shivers minutely and puts on his determined face to march away from the elevator-- and, consequently, toward Bucky.

“What? What’s wrong?” Bucky asks, looking worried. “Have you changed your mind about the bed already? ‘Cause I gotta tell you, pal, that’s a quick turnaround. You’re usually stubborn enough to stick with an idea until someone else gives in.”

Steve is now standing within a foot of Bucky.

“I want to share my bed with you forever,” he says sincerely, grasping Bucky’s hands. Bucky giggles.

“Uh, okay. Guess that’ll save on heating. Just like we used to do, right?”

“No,” says Steve. “Not like we used to. I want to share it romantically. Like a couple.”

Bucky grins and abruptly stifles it, trying to hide his shaking shoulders. “Steve,” he manages, “Stevie. If this is you trying to ask me to date you, uh. I think you might be missing a few steps. Like the dating part. And the asking, actually.”

“Yeah, I want that, too,” agrees Steve easily. Bucky collapses into laughter and rests his head on Steve’s shoulder, crushing their hands between them.

“Sure, I’ll date you, why not?” Bucky gasps. “Should be fun. And, oh, sharing your romantic bed. I guess I’ll do that, too. God, you’re a punk.”

“It’s not like you were any smoother when you asked me out,” says Steve, raising his eyebrows. “Because you _didn’t_.”

“I could’ve done a lot better, though,” Bucky replies thoughtfully.

“Nah,” Steve grins. “I got the first date. It’s going to be better than anything you could’ve planned.”

Bucky’s eyes narrow. “Oh, yeah?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“We’ll see about that,” Bucky says, already making ridiculously grandiose plans for their second date.

And so begins the ~~ir relationship~~ war.

Definitely war.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://lexiconallie.tumblr.com)!


End file.
